We had a real American Autumn weekend.  Which is to say that we raked and baked, had friends in for dinner, ferried Emma about a bit and went to a football game.  It was my first and it was a Harvard game.  That is to say it was something like watching a particularly fit chess club play football.

There were enough hilarious highlights for me that I’ll just tell you this: the marching bands didn’t so much march as saunter and their uniforms, while crimson for Harvard and baby blue for Columbia, were not what I expected.  The Harvard band wore blazers (OK, that I expected) but the Columbia band wore a rag-tag mix of track suits, lacy skirts over woolly tights and chunky Doc Martens, and (for some unknowable reason) one panda bear ski cap.  At halftime each band had a routine.  Now, whether this was an Ivy tradition or these bands were extraordinarily clever, their halftime entertainment was fabulously entertaining.  Each played a selection of (slightly amateurish) songs peppered with current events and pop culture commentary from an unseen announcer.  It was funny and smart and completely appropriate to the student body.  Really, it was like Weekend Update with tubas.  What little dancing the band did was totally spastic with the exception of an adorable Indian guy who seemed to think he was in a Bollywood production number even though the song was (I think) the Harvard anthem.

We brought blankets and gloves and hats, things we never really used in London.  David wore a red bobble cap we got on Portobello Road as a joke some years ago.  Emma was mortified but not nearly as much as she was when he bought a Harvard foam finger (Go future Titans of Industry of Your Choice!) and kept telling her to “Wave the mitten!”  There are banners strung across the Harvard stadium touting long past sporting achievements: 1890 National Champions! 1967 All Ivy!  Well-played, boys, I guess.

Emma was surprised that the game stopped every time someone was tackled.  We are used to rugby where the fallen are left to writhe and the ball just keeps moving forward (or sideways as is the case in England).  It didn’t matter to me who the boys were; each injury made me groan “Somewhere in America a mother is hysterical.”  I remember it well.  (That’s James being grappled by a giant.)

Continuing in the Autumnal activity theme we all went home to hot chocolate and a nap.  To be honest, I napped.  David and Emma went hunting for poster board and construction paper.  It’s Science Fair in America and I, for one, am not waving the mitten (Go Bunsen Burners!).  Cutting, gluing, labeling and folding makes my teeth itch and my hair hurt.  So, I cozied up under a duvet and started reading a galley of a new YA book from Knopf (Knopf!  Who knew they had their publishing finger anywhere near the pop pulse?)  It’s nice, this book, and set in England which is all to the good on a crisp fall day in an empty little house.  I forced myself to drift off for an hour and woke to the sound of complete, rolling around on the floor laughter downstairs.  Here’s that story, which is sort of my point (blunt as it may be).

David and Emma stopped off in a fancy stationery store in Harvard Square for some writing paper.  Thank you notes are still by hand in this house but we managed to lose the lovely box of linen cards and envelopes we had made in London.  When David walked into the shop the clerk (a young woman) looked up at him and smiled widely.  Then she said, “Hi, Guy!”  She blushed and stammered and finally managed, “I mean, what I meant to say was, oh, I’m just flustered!”  Now this is what Emma and I parsed from the clerk’s outburst: first, she’s quite wonderful because how many young girls use the word flustered–and so beautifully?  And second, this is the string of words we are sure ran through her head before she came up with ‘Hi, Guy.’  “Oh, look at that attractive man with his daughter.  Aren’t they lovely together, and he’s really kind of cute in an older, very fit Dad way.  Hello there, cute guy.”  All of which finally slipped out as “Hi, Guy.”

This cracked Emma and David up.  It nearly brought me to tears.  You see, David is the cute guy and it made me oddly thrilled to know that this girl thinks he’s the cute guy, still.  I mean, he was the cute guy I watched across the dining hall in college, the one in the crisp button down and jeans, blond hair curling behind his ears and blue eyes that, even then, crinkled at the corners as if in on a perpetually private joke.  He was preppy perfection in Blucher moccasins and a down vest and I was ‘dark girl’ in a corduroy skirt, tights, clogs, and a boiled wool jacket that made me look like a Swiss shepherdess on the lam. Talk about unfortunate hats, I wore a black beret pulled down low and, on the morning after our first kiss, tortoise shell glasses instead of my contacts because I figured I’d never see him again after I walked into his closet thinking it was the front door.  Seriously, I walked into his closet, closed the door, stood for a full minute in complete darkness willing Narnia to appear behind his ridiculously puffy parka.  It didn’t and I had to ‘come out’ and face David.  Needless to say, I was flustered.

I’d like to believe that the young clerk saw the same look on David’s face that I did all those years ago.  It was a look of gentle amusement, not cruel or even empathetically embarrassed.  Certainly not flustered.  He was smiling as he said to me, “Come here, let me show you the way.”  And he did.